Germany’s social network landscape has consolidated and by the end of 2013, Facebook has taken almost all the users from the VZ networks. But the next 25% are still dominated locally. Twitter is underrepresented. Xing is keeping LinkedIn at bay.

Amazon has shown how you can use news about the deployment of drones for company services can be used for marketing. The use of drones for Amazon Prime will certainly take some time until ready to offer, but the news was a worldwide sensation when announced before christmas 2013. The topic blends with the next:

Shipping and Distribution

A bunch of companies (Amazon and a number of delivery services and postal services) are developing and testing the use of drones for fast, local delivery systems. The promise: a prime service for the impatient consumer as well as for replacement parts for industries, who lose money as long as they have to wait for some screw for a broken machine.

Travel Marketing

A fast growing number of tourist and recreational facilities have found out about the coolness of arial views and videos. They show their facilities from above, so that their target group can have an impression how nice it is at the facility.

Multimedia

Whatever you do to show your product in a cool way, nothing beats the view from above and surrounding your product. You do not have to be in travel/recreation to apply drones for picture/film. Even small things like food, sports gear and toys can be filmed in a completely new way using a camera drone.

Promotions

People are still awed by seeing a little drone flying by and this can be used to attract attention at promotional events. Depending on the strength of your drone you can even do display advertising.

Sweepstakes

Just give your customers a drone. It’s not the new iPhone, but it comes close in coolness.

Edutainment

This blends with multimedia. There are so many products/services that need explanation. Pictures and film created using a drone can sometimes add a new option to do the explaining.

Negative Ads

Time for fun: SilencerCo is marketing its gun silencers with an ad movie where a guy shoots drones.

There is a web app (like an app – but runs in the browser) that product marketers can use to run a price study for their product. The app is wowoodu and it’s users are playfully feeding a price database.

How can you use wowoodu for your pricing?

Pre-Awareness: test you product’s attractiveness before you put it on the broad market and get a feeling for the consumer’s price point for it.

Evangelist-Effect: if your product hits a nerve with the consumer, you may build a group of early adopters and with social media sharing they may even reach evangelist status.

Pre-Sales: while testing your product’s price with wowoodu, you can link to your e-commerce page and start selling.

Viral Sales: the playful character of wowoodu leads to social media sharing, thus creating viral potential for your product.

Price Correction: You will see that your pricing is either too high or to cheap. Actually, more than 50% of products could be priced a little higher. The effect of a consumer, gauging a price too high, with the actual price lower but not the cheapest either, is priceless!

In my case – a GmbH with only one partner – it took 5 weeks from meeting the notary public to receiving the confirmation from the Handelsregister (company register) and the total cost was € 864,-. I decided to post the process and the cost, because when I was considering incorporation I could not find a brief of what will happen. Hope you find it useful.

4 days for the preparation of the memorandum of incorporation and list of partners. At this stage the Inc is “in foundation” (GmbH i.G.) and liability is not yet limited if you start doing business already. At the same time, the notary will send you a bill. In my case it was for €587 plus €127 – the fees depend on the number of partners, the amount of capital stock and if it is paid in fully.

1 week to open a bank account and pay-in your capital stock. Ask the bank to send you an account statement proving the pay-in as soon as the money is in the account.

1 week from sending the statement to the notary, who will then transfer the documents to the court of registration.

1 week for the court to process the registration request and to send the bill for the registration fee (€150) to the stated address of the Inc.

1 week after paying the fee until you receive the confirmation of incorporation. The Inc. is now registered and liability limited. You are doing business as a GmbH now.

I just registered an Inc. in Germany and immediately got 6 pieces of mail which look very authoritylike, “offering” me the registration of the company for a fee ranging from € 333.58 to 697.42. The total sum of “offers” was 3,374.53!

This is how the correct official confirmation of incorporation (Handelsregistereintrag) looks like in Berlin. Do not confuse this with registration offers (“Eintragungsoffert”) from various publishers.

All of that mail came after I had paid the official registration fee (€ 150) to the court. But it came exactly at the time when the official confirmation of incorporation arrived, making it difficult to distinguish from the official information and very easy to get tricked into paying for some service you probably do not want. The registrating court actually warns about these rip-off attempts: some publication companies constantly scout the listings of new incorporations to “offer” them this kind of registration. (Read about the duration and cost of incorporating in Berlin here.)

The six letters I got were from various publishers with very official sounding letter heads like “Handels- und Gewerberegister”. Since the company register is the “Handelsregister” in German, you can be easily mislead to pay and expect to have paid to the state authorities. When you compare the letter head to the beneficiary of your payment slip, you realize that there is a totally different name! One of them even sent me two letters different fees for the same service – I found that very interesting. Why do I not mention the names here, so you can be warned better? Because the way these publishers are working, they would probably flood me with “Abmahnungen” – warning letters costing a legal fee. That’s a German legal issue making the life of bloggers and ecommerce companies difficult. I will come to that in a later post…

The letters look very much like coming from the official authorities. Three of them even bear an eagle as a state symbol, reminding of the official symbol, the Bundesadler.

I found out that many entrepreneurs have already blogged about this rip-off attempt, but one cannot warn enough, especially since international founders will find it hard to distinguish these pieces of mail from the official authorities’ mail.

BA Passengers can now fight insomnia with a 7hour film of a Norwegian train ride.
Here is a 10 minute clip out of the 7hours courtesy of Bergensbahnen under the conditions of a Creative Commons License: «Bergensbanen» – NRK – http://nrkbeta.no/bergensbanen

On February 22, 2014 I had this idea for an app. Today, three months later – wowoodu is online and running flawlessly. As a marketing expert I am not a programmer, therefore I want to encourage other marketing people to learn to code.

In the next few months, I will tell the story, how I created wowoodu, about the problems I had to solve and also how it is progressing. Kind of a marketing reality show.